Alyssa Sherlock is the author of the illustrated memoir this is a love story: poems and essays on friendship, love, and mental health (2023). Alyssa regularly writes on the themes of mental health, family, and friendship in her fiction and creative non-fiction. In 2022, she was shortlisted for the CNFC/Humber Literary Review Creative Non-Fiction Contest. She regularly interviews other writers and storytellers about their work through her newsletter, love letters to storytellers, and occasional “In Conversation” pieces in the Winnipeg Free Press. She lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Treaty 1 territory).
This is a love story you haven’t read before, a raw and vulnerable story of finding hope, love and friendship through struggles with mental illness.
Alyssa Sherlock was a sensitive, anxious child who grew up into a sensitive, anxious adult. In this collection of poetry and essays, Sherlock lays out the reality of becoming her own person while experiencing anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and the illness of loved ones, before exploring how complex friendships can be the support that is needed for recovery.
This book is for anyone who struggles with their own mental health or the mental illnesses of others, to remind them they are not alone, and that there is love and belonging to be found in the most unexpected places. Written in collaboration with friends Erin Toews and Amelia Warkentin, and including illustrations by Amber Wallin, this honest autobiographical collection is perfect for fans of dodie’s Secrets for the Mad.
Available now wherever books are sold.
“I suppose in one way or another we are all storytellers. Not only artists, but all of us. Lawyers and double-glazing salesmen and teachers and medics. Stories rule. We need them to shape our everyday and our overall existence. I have come to believe that this is what grief is: a crashing of the story in which we had believed. The shock of that dissolution is—literally—unimaginably violent. Recovery from grief involves a gradual acceptance of the unwelcome narrative and the tentative respinning of a new web of story around it. Story and the ability to negotiate narrative are, maybe, a form of mental health.”
Tilda Swinton, The Show Girl in Wonderland
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Copyright (C) 2022 Alyssa Sherlock
Alyssa Sherlock 